No sooner had the semester ended when my summer began. My writing competition got completed Thursday evening and mailed off on Friday morning. Then it was time to pack. The rest of Friday and Saturday morning I packed up and moved out everything from my apartment. It was hot and sweltering and stressful, yet in its own way glorious. By the time I got in the car and drove away on Saturday at least one thing was true: I no longer had to live, ever again, with the horrible rooster-crowing, indoor-smoking, fire-endangering* disaster of a roommate.
(* = I don't think I mentioned the latest issue with her, that she would put something in the oven on 400+ degrees and then go to sleep and forget about it. It was a happy day when our oven broke and she finally couldn't do that anymore.)
It turns out I inadvertently inconvenienced her, and I initially felt bad about that. RCN wouldn't let me easily put the internet/cable/etc. account in the name of the woman who took over my room (or anyone else's, for that matter). So I had to cancel it (I didn't want it in my name for the time I wasn't there, and that way the new people could start their own service). I set it to terminate on May 13, my last full day there, and notified Bad Roommate about it in advance. She got very stressed out because apparently she's looking for a job and didn't think she could go without Internet. I did feel a little guilty, like maybe I could have gone out of my way to leave it on longer and not leave her in the lurch. That feeling passed quickly, though, when she went in to her room and started smoking.
But before I could celebrate my newfound freedom on Saturday, I still had to load up the car so I could move to Washington, DC for the summer. This was a trickier procedure than I would have liked. My friend from school is also spending the summer there so I offered to drive him down with me. That was fine in theory but I realized too late that I had neglected to calculate how much space in my car would be consumed by him sitting in it. Oh, and his stuff too. But on the upside, at least he was manual labor who helped carry all sorts of stuff while I played Sentra Tetris again and wedged in what I could.
Eventually we got in the car and started driving, stopping off that night at my dad's in New Jersey before getting to Washington on Sunday. I found a room in a Bay Area-style group home. My landlord saw one in Oakland once and decided to run his own in DC. There's about nine rooms, with a common TV area, kitchen, and bathrooms. You'd think I'd have learned my lesson about living with lots of roommates but at least here smoking is not permitted indoors and someone comes in to clean twice a month. I've got my own room that locks, and the other people seem nice. A very eclectic, intellectual mix. More often than not I come home to The News Hour or CSPAN on the television in the living room. Lots of students and Washington interns. It will be an interesting place to spend the summer.
I was very busy with the move and unpacking last week, so I didn't get to post until 5/24. It should have been posted when it actually happened, which the adjusted date reflects. Since I moved in another woman moved into the room next to me. She seems nice. She does NOT own a rooster alarm clock. She is amazed that I was able to exercise such restraint over the course of the previous year in not dismembering either the clock... or the previous roommate.